Indoctrination,not Education
Teaching students arrogance and ignorance is a
disservice

By Victor Davis Hanson
WashingtonTimes.com

What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces,
trigger warnings, speech codes and censorship have
to do with higher learning?

American universities want it both ways. They expect
unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but
also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else.

In fact, today’s campuses mimic ideological boot
camps. Tenured professors seek to indoctrinate young
people in certain preconceived progressive political
agendas. Environmental studies classes are not very
open to debating the “settled science” of
man-caused, carbon-induced global warming — or the
need for immediate and massive government
intervention to address it. Grade-conscious and
indebted students make the necessary ideological
adjustments.

Few sociological courses celebrate the uniquely
American assimilationist melting pot. Race, class
and gender agenda courses — along with thousands of
“studies” courses — have been invented. A generation
of politicized professors has made the strange
argument that they alone have discovered all sorts
of critical new disciplines of knowledge —
apparently unknown for 2,500 years — to ensure that
graduates would be better educated than ever before.

Universities have lost their commitment to the
inductive method. Preconceived anti-Enlightenment
theories are established as settled fact and part of
career promotion. Evidence is made to fit these
unquestioned assumptions.

Two unfortunate results have predictably followed.

Students now leave campus largely prepped by their
professors to embrace a predictable menu: the
glories of larger government, income redistribution,
greater entitlements, radical environmentalism,
abortion, multiculturalism, suspicion of traditional
religion, and antipathy to the international role of
the United States in the past and present.

Unfortunately, this costly indoctrination comes at
the expense of what is increasingly less taught:
traditional mastery of foreign languages, great
works of literature, philosophy, history, mastery of
grammar and composition, and the Socratic method.

Careerism often drives campus politics. If poor,
minority or first-generation college students could
obtain the traditional tools of success — English
and mathematic literacy, acquaintance with American
history and protocols, oral and written language
mastery — they would succeed as individuals without
need for the college industry of collective
victimology that assumes a permanent lack of parity.

Employers and the adult world no longer equate a
bachelor’s degree with proof of a well-rounded
education. Yet chastised universities usually oppose
any objective measurement of their effectiveness.
They certainly want federally insured student loans,
but they do not want proof of their competency
through national exit tests, which might help ensure
that all graduates leave college able to compute,
read and write well. How odd that standardized tests
are permissible to judge entering students but not
to certify exiting ones.

Colleges are schizophrenic in lots of other ways.
They claim they are special institutions that should
be free to form their own curricula, enjoy ancient
rites such as faculty tenure, not worry much how
much they charge students or treat part-time
faculty, and establish radical new legal protocols
that run contrary to the Constitution.

When colleges create “safe spaces” designated by
race and gender, they butt up against U.S. law.
Assuming the guilt rather than innocence of students
accused of bad behavior does not stand up in court.

Most Americans who work in a mall or shop are not
awarded lifelong guaranteed employment. Nor are our
newspapers censored with “trigger warnings” in fear
that readers might become hurt by depressing news
stories.

Universities ask the public to subsidize these
strange rituals by making endowments tax-exempt. The
government extends federally guaranteed loans and
ensures write-offs for charitable giving.

In the past, there was a clear bargain. The
university said, “Leave us alone to do our business
that we know best, and we promise to turn out the
best-educated and most inductive generation of
American youth.”

Universities are now breaking their word. Students,
if they even graduate (about four in 10 do not, even
after six years), are not “universally” educated.
Instead, they are the least prepared yet most
politicized graduates in memory. Arrogance and
ignorance are a bad combination.

If the university cannot fulfill its original
compact of broadly educating youth while keeping
within bounds of American laws and protocols, then
it will either have to change or slowly become
irrelevant.

The market is already sensing a void and, thus,
opportunity. Online degree programs proliferate.
Private vocational and trade schools sprout up
around college campuses. Even Ivy League degrees
have become mostly empty brand names, like Gucci or
Versace, that convey status and open doors but
hardly guarantee that graduates are knowledgeable or
inductive thinkers.

All of these growing alternatives to borrowing a
collective $1 trillion for university education
reflect that it may not only be a bad deal, but a
rigged one as well.

•Victor
Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian with the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University